CE Posters: Where are you politically?

[strat-0]

This poll is for participants at CE. You need to have at least posted their occasionally.

Be honest! Now that I can't change the wording, let's just say that 1 is totally left and 10 is totally right and dispense with the labels.

[Galactus]

I think we could make a game out of this...we could try to guess who picked what number.

[shin]

I took an online test the other day that did something just like this. I was rated a "Social Liberal" at "30%" (indeed) and an "Economic Liberal" (er..?) at "70%". It told me I was a "Democrat". I think it's therefore fair to say I'm a "3" here.

[Galactus]

I took that same test a couple week ago. I'll try to find it again. I don't remember what my numbers were but I was just left of the middle...the graph where it shows were you are compared with historical figures is pretty neat.

[riley]

I went with 4, since I seem to fall left of centre on most things.

A thought though. If the exercise is to get a rough sense of where the scales on CE are tilting these days, but it's open to anyone who's contributed even just a little, I would think it will without much doubt show the scales are tipped against the right. If you isolate it to just American posters, maybe it's closer, but I'd be surprised if many of the global posters here would sit anywhere right of centre. Maybe I'm wrong.

[riley]

Whoever's mixed up is clearly a fascist.

[Dr. Drum]

Card-carrying social democrat, which is a pretty mainstream thing to be in Canada (and most of the developed world), so I went with a 3. Tempted, in a way, to quote Peter Buck on this; i.e. "the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff"...

Traditionally, there are Canadian parties that are to the left of the NDP but to the right of the Marxist-Leninists. The Greens, for example, though they have a relatively right-wing leader right now (former Conservative).

[phil]

Social Democrat too ...

The only political party I was ever a member of
was le parti Rhinoceros (1980 - 1984 federal elections) ...

Long live our fearless leader : Cornélius premier ...

A perfect example of every politician :
Thick skinned, slow moving, low intellect
but can move awfully fast to get out of danger ...

The Rhinos have also promised to break every promise (a platform plank they claim has been copied and put into execution by the mainstream parties) and have promised, if elected, to immediately demand a recount.

Other platform promises released by the Rhinoceros Party included:

- repealing the law of gravity,
- reducing the speed of light because it's much too fast,
- paving the province of Manitoba to create the world's largest parking lot,
- providing higher education by building taller schools,
instituting English, French and illiteracy as Canada's three official languages,
- offering to retrain those constituents who want to become illiterate by enrolling them in a state educational institution,
- tearing down the Rocky Mountains so that Albertans could see the Pacific sunset, or moving them one metre west as a make-work project,
- legalising pot. And pans. And spatulas. And other kitchen utensils,
- building sloping roads and bicycle paths across the country so that Canadians could "coast from coast to coast",
- responding to the energy crisis, reducing energy costs for transportation by moving the cities of Montréal 50km west and Toronto 50km east,
- abolishing pumping oil out of the ground as that oil is there to keep the earth moving smoothly on its axis and if you withdraw the oil, the whole thing will grind to a halt,
- abolishing the environment because it's too hard to keep clean and it takes up so much space,
- annexing the United States, which would take its place as the third territory (after the Yukon and North-West Territories) in Canada's backyard, in order to raise the mean temperature of Canada by one degree Celsius,
- replacing the Canadian Armed Forces with clones of Vladislav Tretiak,
- making bubble gum the national currency, so that it could be inflated or deflated at will,
- breeding a mosquito that would only hatch in January so that "the little buggers will freeze to death",
- turning Montreal's Saint Catherine Street (the Main) into the world's longest bowling alley,
- adopting the British system of driving on the left; this was to be gradually phased in over five years with large trucks first, then buses, eventually including small cars and bicycles last,
- putting the national debt on Visa,
- declaring war on Belgium because a Belgian cartoon character, Tintin, killed a rhinoceros in one of the cartoons,
- offering to call off the proposed Belgium-Canada war if Belgium delivered a case of mussels and a case of Belgian beer to Rhinoceros "Hindquarters" in Montréal (the Belgian Embassy in Ottawa did, in fact, do this),
- painting Canada's coastal sea limits so that Canadian fish would know where they were at all times,
- counting the Thousand Islands to make sure none were missing,
- running a Penny Hoar in Toronto on a safe sex platform,
- running more than one candidate per riding as an MP's salary is certainly enough to support more than one person,
- exploiting acid rain as an electrical energy source by placing dissimilar-metal electrodes in Canadian swimming pools in order to use them as batteries,
- making Canadians stronger by putting steroids in the water,
- banning lousy Canadian winters,
- moving the Vatican to Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, Quebec to promote tourism,
- putting the West Edmonton Mall on wheels and rolling it to areas of the country suffering from economic depression,
- turning the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine tunnel (which run under the St-Lawrence river)in Montreal into a free carwash by poking hole in the ceiling.

Despite the obvious appeal of banning winter, the Rhinoceros Party never succeeded in winning a seat in Parliament. In the 1984 federal election, however, the party won the fourth-largest number of votes, after the three main political parties, but ahead of several well-established minor parties. Rhino candidates sometimes came in second in certain ridings, humiliating traditional Canadian parties in the process. In the 1980 federal election, for instance, the Rhinoceros party nominated a professional clown/comedian named Sonia "Chatouille" Côté ('chatouille' means tickles in French) in the Laurier riding in Montréal. Côté came in second place, after the successful Liberal candidate, but ahead of both other major parties: the third place New Democrat, and the fourth-place Progressive Conservative candidate. Chatouille received almost twice as many votes as the PC candidate.

Early in the party's history, when it was mainly composed of French-speaking Québécois, they chose as their official translator a party member who was the only unilingual anglophone party member at the time.

Although not recognized in the United States, former baseball pitcher Bill Lee ran for President of the United States in 1988 on the Rhinoceros Party ticket.

[maarts]

Rhinoceros...sounds very Ionesque!

I'm not a fascist but I am not clear cut on a political identity myself. I am a reasonably good earner who likes to see his income protected, yet also has some socialist tendencies and especially from the school of former social-democrat Willem Drees, who set up a scheme of social benefits for the unemployed and the elderly. It was set up at the restoration period after the second world war and provided a safety net for the income earners, an ideal that was later shared and enhanced by liberals and (Christian)-Democrats alike.
In Holland the division between the (high) income-earner party-liberals and the socialists is very clear cut, here down under it's like two Centralist parties duking it out on minor details. As much as I can see the set identities within Labour and Liberals, most opf their policies could have come from either camp. My main political concerns are the most common ones- health, education, crime, social security. Both parties have good plans and bad ones and no(t enough) money to spend on it. So you can only choose the best people for the job and I don't really have good faith in either party...
Thank the stars I'm a resident only and am not allowed to vote there....

[Thorngrub]

I voted a freaking 5; that's as far away from Communist and Fascist as I could fucking get. Jesus Christ on a pogostick.

[phil]

Rhinoceros...sounds very Ionesque!

As it should be !!

Ionesco was involved with the Collège de 'Pataphysique' and became friends with Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian, who were its most active members.

The Collège was dedicated to nihilist irony, practical jokes, and the demolition of culture. It had a commission which was preparing a thesis on the history of latrines.

[strat-0]

Thorn, you must have missed this:

Now that I can't change the wording, let's just say that 1 is totally left and 10 is totally right and dispense with the labels.

You are way left of "5" unless there's something you haven't been telling us!

[Mary]

I voted 2, but here are some thoughts...

Doc Drum's point about a social democrat being perfectly mainstream in Canada is interesting - is this some absolute scale that we're voting on, or are we voting relative to our own country? I did maybe a little of both - hell, i'm probably a 1 relative to American politic, but I'm probably more of a 3 in Europe.

The other thing that makes this hard for me is that I feel a huge gap between what I yearn for and what I believe is remotely possible. It's not even about a clash between my inner idealist and my inner realist - because I'm not saying that socialism violates human nature or anything like that - I'm just a total pessimist about any fight for social justice in the contemporary world. So here in America, I vote Democrat. Meanwhile, in graduate school, I identify with third-generation Marxism. What does that mean about my politics? I don't know. It means I'm a resigned pragmatist, or something. It makes it hard for me to place myself on any such scale.

Third, I'm not really convinced the ideological scale is unidimensional and linear. In some ways of thinking about politics, libertarians are further right than conventional (american) republicans, and in other ways of thinking about politics, libertarians are actually to the left of republicans. I know we dispensed with the labels "fascism" and "communism" but they do a good job of pointing out the difficulty of thinking about political beliefs as a linear spectrum from left to right - is fascism really the furthest "right" you can get? With its authoritarian valorization of the state? That's definitely "right" on some models of ideology, but on others, such a valorization of the state is actually antithetical to the right.

Not at all a critique of start-o's poll - these are just perennial problems in thinking about ideology.

One last note - I also had to place myself at 2, and not 1, because I have this friend whose politics could only be described as the politics of imminent revolution. He seems like a total fucking nutjob to me, and I seem like a reactionary to him. Whenever I think I don't have a conservative bone in my body, I just chat with him for half an hour, and then I wander off shaking my head about the nutty left.... the moral is - you can always find someone even crazier than you are!!

Cheers,
M

[rockysigman]

I pegged myself as a 3, but that was just a guess.

[strat-0]

Good points, Mary. The reason I said, "On a US scale of 1 to 10" was to try to level the playing field a bit and have everyone use one scale; a Canadian might consider themselves a centrist for their country, but on a US scale, I'm sure they'd say they're a little more left. And I appreciate the problems with the linear scale and labels (that's why I said to disregard the labels). Being mainly a Libertarian, I struggle with the left/right question and picked "all mixed up" becaise I'm all over the place, though really I think I'm more to the left of center overall.